How To Get “top rankings” with Search Engines Using RSS Feeds
RSS is one of the popular features to hit online publishing in recent years and bloggers and content site owners love it. But what exactly is RSS?
RSS or Really Simple Syndication, is a file format used by publishers to make their content readily available to others in a format that can be universally read and understood. RSS allows publishers to “syndicate” their content to distribution lists with hyperlinks. RSS has actually been around for quite a while, but with the increased use of spam filters and online blogging, it has quickly become the choice of bloggers and ezine publishers who want to get their messages out to their subscribers. Not much attention, however, has been discussed about the advantages that using RSS provides for search engine optimization.
Search Engines Love RSS
Many “seo experts” (Search Engine Optimization) believe that sites optimized around themes or targeted topics, where all the content corresponds to a particular subject or set of keywords, rank better and get “top rankings” in the search engines. As an example; if your website is designed to sell soccer balls, all the content on your site would be focused around soccer and soccer balls.. The major search engines like Google definitely seem to prefer tightly-themed pages and will give those sites “top rankings“.
But where does RSS figure in all this?
RSS feeds, are most commonly obtained from news feeds or blogs, and most often correspond to a particular theme or topic. If you used some of these highly targeted RSS feeds on your site you can increase your site’s content without having to write any content of your own. It’s really kind of like having someone else write content for you and feed it to you – and all for free! Now that’s a “low cost seo” approach if I ever saw one.
How does RSS improve my Search Engine “top rankings”?
There are three primary reasons why using content from RSS Feeds provides irresistible content for the search engine spiders.
1. RSS Feeds Provide Instant Themed Content
There can be hundreds, even thousands of publishers of RSS feeds that are specific to a particular topic. Since the feeds they provide have highly targeted content, they could contain several keywords that you want to rank highly for. (Hint: search for RSS feeds by the keyword(s) you want to promote.) Adding content containing these keywords helps to get Google to tag your site as one with pertinent and relevant content.
2. RSS Feeds Provide Fresh, Up to Date Content
RSS feeds from the larger publishers are updated at regular intervals. When publishers add new articles/content to the feed, the older articles are dropped. These content changes immediately update your web pages with the new RSS feed content as well. Thus you are constantly getting new, relevant content for your site visitors every hour or day. It really is a “low cost seo” approach.
3. RSS Feeds Yield More Frequent Spidering
One neat thing that happens as a result of adding an RSS feed to your site is that the Googlebot (and other Web-Bots) may visit your site daily. To these web-bots, your pages that have an RSS feed incorporated into them make the web-bots think you have a good page that is being updated daily. The web-bots, in their judgement, may rate the page as worth visiting daily. This means that you will have your site being indexed more frequently by the Web-bots and any new content you add to your site will be discovered much faster.
How Can this benefit the Owner of a Website or Internet Marketer?
Google and the other major search engines tend to index pages at the beginning of the month. If you publish new content to your site and you miss that update, you may need to wait until the next month to see your content indexed. But, since your site has RSS feeds and a constant flow of new traffic, your site gets indexed more frequently. Thus, the chances of your content getting indexed quickly are much higher. This could be important if you are marketing new products or information that has to be provided on a timely basis.
But, the biggest advantage may be that fresh content is loved by the search engines and you will get higher rankings from them, which translates to more traffic to your site.
RSS offers you a way to get “top rankings” on the search engines using a “low cost seo” approach. You can do it yourself and you won’t require the services of “seo experts“.
